Chapter 9

ARREST—AN IMPARTIAL WITNESS—THE OFFICE OF THE PRETCHISTENSKY POLICE STATION—A PATRIARCHAL JUDGE

‘Till to-morrow,’ I repeated, as I fell asleep.... I felt extraordinarily light-hearted and happy.

Between one and two in the night, my father’s valet woke me; he was not dressed and was panic-stricken.

‘An officer is asking for you.’

‘What officer?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, I do,’ I told him and flung on my dressing-gown.

In the doorway of the drawing-room, a figure was standing wrapped in a military greatcoat; by the window I saw a white plume, behind there were other persons,—I distinguished the cap of a Cossack.

It was the police-master, Miller.

He told me that by an order of the military governor-general, which he held in his hand, he must look through my papers. Candles were brought. The police-master took my keys; the district police superintendent and his lieutenant began rummaging among my books and my linen. The police-master busied himself among my papers; everything seemed to him suspicious, he laid them all on one side and all at once turned to me and said: ‘I must ask you to dress meanwhile; you’ll come along with me.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘To the Pretchistensky police station,’ answered the police-master in a soothing voice.

‘And then?’

‘There is nothing more in the governor-general’s instructions.’

I began to dress.

Meanwhile the panic-stricken servants had awakened my mother. She rushed out of her bedroom and was coming to my room, but was stopped by a Cossack at the drawing-room door. She uttered a shriek, I shuddered and ran to her. The police-master left the papers and came with me to the drawing-room. He apologised to my mother, let her pass, swore at the Cossack, who was not to blame, and went back to the papers.

Then my father came up. He was pale but tried to maintain his studied indifference. The scene was becoming painful. My mother sat in the corner, weeping. My old father spoke of irrelevant matters with the police-master, but his voice shook. I was afraid that I could not stand this for long and did not want to afford the local police superintendent the satisfaction of seeing me in tears.

I pulled the police-master by the sleeve, ‘Let us go!’

‘Let us go,’ he said with relief. My father went out of the room and returned a minute later. He brought a little ikon and put it round my neck, saying that his father had given it to him with his blessing on his deathbed. I was touched: this _religious_ gift showed me the degree of terror and distress in the old man’s heart. I knelt down while he was putting it on; he helped me up, embraced me and blessed me.

The ikon was a picture in enamel of the head of John the Baptist on a charger. What this was—example, advice, or prophecy?—I don’t know, but the significance of the ikon struck me.

My mother was almost unconscious.

All the servants accompanied me down the staircase weeping and rushing to kiss me or my hand. I felt as though I were present at my own funeral. The police-master scowled and hurried on.

When we went out at the gate he collected his company; he had with him four Cossacks, two police superintendents and two ordinary policemen.

‘Allow me to go home,’ a man with a beard who was sitting in front of the gate asked the police-master.

‘You can go,’ said Miller.

‘What man is that?’ I asked, getting into the droshky.

‘The impartial witness; you know that without an impartial witness the police cannot enter a house.’

‘Then why did you leave him at the gate?’

‘It’s a mere form! It’s simply keeping the man out of bed for nothing,’ observed Miller

We drove accompanied by two Cossacks on horseback.

There was no special room for me in the police station. The police-master directed that I should be put in the office until the morning. He himself took me there; he flung himself in an easy chair and, yawning wearily, muttered: ‘It’s a damnable service. I’ve been at the races since three o’clock in the afternoon, and here I’ll be busy with you till morning. I bet it’s past three already and to-morrow I must go with the report at nine.’

‘Good-bye,’ he added a minute later, and went out. A non-commissioned officer locked me in, observing that if I wanted anything I could knock at the door.

I opened the window. The day was already beginning and the wind of morning was rising; I asked the non-commissioned officer for water and drank off a whole jugful. There was no thinking of sleep. Besides there was nowhere to lie down; apart from the dirty leather chair and one easy chair, there was nothing in the office but a big table heaped up with papers and in the corner a little table still more heaped up with papers. The dim night-light hardly lighted the room, but made a flickering patch of light on the ceiling that grew paler and paler with the dawn.

I sat down in the place of the police superintendent and took up the first paper that was lying on the table, a document relating to the funeral of a serf of Prince Gagarin’s and a medical certificate that he had died according to all the rules of medical science. I picked up another—it was a set of police regulations. I ran through it and found a paragraph which stated that ‘Every arrested man has the right within three days after his arrest to know the ground of his arrest or to be released.’ I noted this paragraph for my own benefit.

An hour later I saw through the window our butler bringing me a pillow, bedclothes, and a greatcoat. He asked something of the non-commissioned officer, probably permission to come in to me; he was a grey-headed old man, to two or three of whose children I had stood godfather as a small boy. The non-commissioned officer gave him a rough and abrupt refusal; one of our coachmen was standing near. I shouted to them from the window. The non-commissioned officer fussed about and told them to be off. The old man bowed to me and shed tears; the coachman, as he lashed the horses, took off his hat and wiped his eyes, the droshky rattled away and my tears fell in streams, my heart was brimming over; they were the first and last tears I shed while I was in prison.

Towards morning the office began to fill up, the clerk arrived still drunk from the evening before, a consumptive-looking individual with red hair, a look of brutal vice on his pimpled face. He wore a very dirty, badly-cut and shiny coat of a brick colour. After him another extremely free-and-easy individual in the greatcoat of a non-commissioned officer arrived. He at once addressed me with the question:

‘Were you taken at the theatre or what?’

‘I was arrested at home.’

‘Did Fyodor Ivanovitch himself arrest you?’

‘Who’s Fyodor Ivanovitch?’

‘Colonel Miller.’

‘Yes.’

‘I understand.’ He winked to the red-haired man who showed no interest whatever. The free-and-easy individual did not continue the conversation—he saw that I had been taken neither for disorderly conduct nor drunkenness, so lost all interest in me, or perhaps was afraid to enter into conversation with a dangerous prisoner.

Not long afterwards various sleepy-looking police officials made their appearance and then came people with grievances and legal complaints.

The keeper of a brothel brought a complaint against the owner of a beer-shop, that he had publicly insulted her in his shop in such language, as, being a woman, she could not bring herself to utter before the police. The shopkeeper swore that he had not used such language. The woman swore that he had uttered the words more than once and very loudly, and added that he had raised his hand against her and that, if she had not ducked, he would have cut her face open. The shopkeeper declared that, in the first place, she had not paid what she owed him, and, in the second, had insulted him in his own shop and, what’s more, threatened that he should be thrashed within an inch of his life by her followers.

The brothel-keeper, a tall, untidy woman with puffy eyes, screamed in a loud shrill voice and was extremely talkative. The man made more use of mimicry and gesture than of words.

The police Solomon, instead of judging between them, scolded them both vigorously.

‘The dogs are too well fed, that’s why they run mad,’ he said; ‘the beasts should sit quiet at home and be thankful we say nothing and leave them in peace. An important matter, indeed! They quarrel and run at once to trouble the police. And you’re a fine lady! as though it were the first time—what’s one to call you if not a bad word with the trade you follow?’

The shopkeeper shook his head and shrugged his shoulders to express his profound gratification. The police officer at once pounced upon him and said, ‘What do you go barking behind your counter for, you dog? Do you want to go to the lock-up? You’re a foul-tongued brute, and lifting your ugly paw too—do you want a taste of the birch, eh?’

For me this scene had all the charm of novelty and it remained imprinted on my memory for ever, it was the first case of patriarchal Russian justice I had seen.

The brothel-keeper and the police continued shouting until the police superintendent came in. Without inquiring why these people were there or what they wanted, he shouted in a still more savage voice: ‘Get out, be off, this isn’t a public bath-house or a pot-house!’

Having driven ‘the scum’ out he turned to the police, ‘You ought to be ashamed to allow such disorder! How many times I have said to you the place won’t be held in proper respect, low creatures like that will turn it into a perfect Bedlam, you are too easy-going with these scoundrels. What man is this?’ he asked about me.

‘A prisoner brought in by Fyodor Ivanovitch, here is the document concerning him.’

The superintendent ran through the document, looked at me, met with disapproval the direct and unflinching gaze which I fixed upon him, prepared at the first word to give as good as I got, and said ‘Excuse me.’

The affair of the brothel-keeper and the beer-shop man began again. She insisted on making a deposition on oath. A priest arrived. I believe they both made sworn statements; I did not see the end of it. I was taken away to the head police-master’s. I do not know why; no one said a word to me; then again I was brought back to the police station, where a room had been prepared for me under the watch tower. The non-commissioned officer observed that if I wanted anything to eat, I had better send out to buy it, that the government ration had not been fixed yet and that it would not be for another two days; moreover, that it consisted of two or three kopecks of silver and that the better-class prisoners did not claim it.

There was a dirty sofa standing by the wall; it was past midday, I felt fearfully tired, flung myself on the sofa and slept like the dead. When I woke up, all was quiet and serene in my heart. I had been worn out of late by uncertainty about Ogaryov, now my turn too had come, the danger was no longer far off, but was all about me, the storm-cloud was overhead. This first persecution was to be our consecration.